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Org citizens have got to feel that their voice and vote matters and whether they cannot spare a single sent to help a person running for office or if they can write a big check, they are concerned, their struggles will be listen to and followed up on. Sunday night on q a, wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin talks about her career in politics. They helped shepherd the change whereby senators were not appointed by their legislatures but demanded elections. I guess, the idea that it wasnt going to be the party bosses who made the decision of who the nominees were in smoke filled the back rooms, but rather the people who were going to get a chance to vote in free and fair elections. Sunday night on 80 string on cspan q and a. Tj stiles talked about custers trials trials. His biography of general George Armstrong custer. He is interviewed by Paul Andrew Hutton in this one hourlong event. Hello everyone. My name is Paul Andrew Hutton. J im a professor at the university of new mexico, just to the east. Welcome to the eighth annual tucson festival of the books. We want to especially thank cspan, book tv and Cox Communication for sponsoring this. This presentation will last an hour but i will talk for about 40 minutes and then well open it up for questions from the audience. Please go to the microphone there on either side to do your question. Immediately following, tj stiles will be autographing books in booth 153 booth 153 sponsored by the university of arizona bookstores. Books are available for purchase you like people to buy your books, dont you tj. Yes, it helps me write. Because you are here, your Tax Deduction helps us offer a programming free of the public and support critical literary programs in the community. Y. Become a friend in person today by visiting the south union website. Your gift makes a difference. I dont need to tell you what a fabulous book festival you have. Its absolutely a marvel. Out of respect for the authors, your fellow audience members let me tell you what i say to my students. I dont know why you have your phones with you, try to lose communication with the outside world for a while and lose yourself in the world of books. Please put them on mute. We were here together on this stage four years ago or five years ago. It was probably more than that. The years go by so quickly. You had just won the Pulitzer Prize and a prize for your fabulous book vanderbilt. Before that you had written jesse james, the last rebel which was very well received and your current book is custers trials, a life on the frontier of new america. They are. Tj lives in berkeley california with his family. You are already picking up prizes again. I just learned last night you learned earned the spur award for biography. Congratulations on that [applause]. Thank you as i mentioned, to get the award anyway is wonderful but from people who know a lot and have written a lot about custer is very, very nice. In 2012, Michael Okeefe published a twovolume bibliography on George Armstrong custer. There were 10,000 items. The annotated them all. 3000 of them were books. I think the logical firstt i hate mybegin with is tj, why custer . I hate myself. No. [laughter]readers and first of all i have to say thank you for coming here. I really do appreciate it. I love the chance to talk to readers and potential readers even more. Also, to have a conversation with Paul Andrew Hutton who is not just the great historian but a great writer and he has a book coming out this spring called the apache wars which, i had a chance to read it and its phenomenal. So to ha so watch for that please. So to have this conversation with not only a historian but a good writer is terrific. I could go on and give a whole spiel about custer and tell you why my book is justified but the subtitle asked lanes my whole approach. Sometimes you go into a subject because it hasnt been written about enough before or you feel like people have gotten the wrong and as i say, there is a lot of great writing as well as a lot of writing about custer and my approach was to change the camera angle. Im interested in how the modern United States came to be. People have focused on these very high profile aspects of custers life, first and foremost which is emphatically not to focus on my book. I do focus very much on his western career but also what i try to do is contextualize thewr parts in the civil war, thats a huge part part my book, with the lesserknown parts of his life and to show how he was engaged in all kinds of ways with the making of modern america, and how his notoriety and his fame was very much based on things that we dont associate with custer. Things like race and federal power and the new literary culture, and it was emerging in america and the rise of corporation and finance and wall street. The western story story in the civil war story and the place of women and the female characters in his life were so fascinating. I thought it was such a rich life thing complicated and volatile. There was a new way of looking at him that doesnt devalue the iconic parts but integrates it with things that people have known about but havent so much focus on. You certainly accomplish that task. When last we were here talking about vanderbilt, i was really just stunned by how beautifully written and what a magnificent work the vanderbilt book was. It had to be to win both the full surprise in the National Book award. I didnt know anything about vanderbilt. Ow i didnt know who he was or what he had done, but custer is a character character that i know a lot about. So what is even more astonishing to me, i learned so much from the vanderbilt book but ioo learned from this custer book as well. I learned a new way to look at custer. Of course like the vanderbilt of what you are doing is expanding biography. It couldve just as easily one a non fiction because it really is a book about american histore in the most tumultuous period, the civil war and the gilded age also the closing of the american frontier which custers last stand is the climactic moment of. So you treat the most spectacular moment of his life, his death which every other book focuses on and heads toward. And i just thought that was an incredibly bold decision. It fits in nicely with the tone in the structure of your book. That was a decision that i came to very early on which was to not have a final chapter or a final part of the book devoted to little big form but to try to treat it in a way that kind of reflects the experience that americans had that it was something to place offstage. Tr theyre trying to figure it outs after the battle was over. During the book, one reason why people like to write about custer is because the letters and the personal information really allows the writer to get into his life and even inside his head to a certain extent because he wrote about what he thought and felt so much. As a friend of his said, there was no there was just no doubt about what he was thinking. He was all out in the open. What you saw was what you got. S he was so motive and expressive and wrote so much that its very interior biography in a way that i couldnt write about jesse jaynes or vanderbilt about. Its personal relationship and his emotions in his daily struggles, his faults. But then after following such a biography like this, i was was literally writing over the horizon and waving goodbye and then i pick up the next epilogue and im giving this way, im sorry. The reno court of inquiry a couple years later, now you suddenly are jarred out of that experience of his life and now youre in the position of trying to figure out what went on. I was inspired in that idea by not only my idea to say this is not a book about little big corn. But also to say, to think about the effect when i read battle cry freedom. This is something i read a review that made me think about it and made me think yes that seeks. I had to when you to lincolns assassination, he doesnt describe it. He has this marvelous chapter of the civil war where John Wilkes Booth is wearing hes going to kill lincoln after he makes a speech saying maybe we should allow africanamericans to vote and then it ends with the next chapter starting the aftermath of the assassination. One of the great dramatic moments is completely offstage. Its such a powerful effect and it makes it more powerful. D so i thought, i want to have the impact of little big corn there, but i dont want to focus on it. I dont want to get swallowed up by such a huge event and make my book about that. How do i do that. So having it take place offstage was actually a way of saying yes its important, but also i can can never take you there. Not only is this book not about that, but its such a complex and difficult to understand event. So lets not even try. Lets just show how americans struggled with it. Then leave people within incomplete understanding because that is all we will ever have. I can almost see a movieer, w producer in hollywood sang custer, custer why do we want to do custer. Everybody knows how it ends and its a downer, but that is part of the unique mastery of the book. The subject is that the end is not the story. The story is how we get to the end which is, think about it, for all of us, that is what life is about. Its how we get to the end. Usually we dont dwell too much on the end. In custers. In custers case it was pretty spectacular but nevertheless, this is the first book that really delves so deeply into the complexity of his character and what his life was like and what his life meant to america. Thank you very much. The interesting thing about writing history and biography, especially for the wellknown event is that you are presented with the fact that people know how it comes out. David lodge who wrote a book with a collection of columns he wrote called the art of fiction distinguishes between mystery and suspense. Suspense is when you dont know whats going to happen next. Mystery is when you know what happens but you dont know how to get there. Youre engrossed in the discovery and the explanation. When you write history, there there is suspense because nobody knows all the events, but theres also mystery. You have to immerse people in the story of the story. So i thought about that as i wrote the custer book because theres a lot of events. The question was, custer, whether little big corn is so famous is because he was the one who was wiped out. There were a lot of other Major Military figures in the west and if they had died at little big horn, i dont think it would be the same. Custer was a cultural icon and both the hero and an icon in his own lifetime. That means he meant something to americans. So what i tried to do was look at that interior story but his life meant things to americans because of what they were going through in a way in which it was very exaggerated and volatile and sometimes selfdestructive way, he was all about the changes in america at that time. So, for example, in the civil war he started to affect that style of the boy generals. The golden hair and he shows up at the age of 23 with the black velveteen uniform with goldmining up from his elbow. He was a very cultivated image. There are two things about that. Want to mention in the book that actually serve the tactical purpose in on the battlefield where people expected the commanders to be in the mix and its actually helpful because they can see where the general is and there was inspired to follow him. Its also something that spoke to americans who are going through the most costly war so far. Theres disillusionment in agony as the generation who thought they were going to win the war with personal aurora x and theyre getting slaughtered in mass infantry warfare. They are dawning by the hundreds of thousands of disease and heres custer who, in that slice of civil war where the cavalrys fighting cavalry at close range is leading charges. He is embodying that romantic ideal that americans went to war with and hes winning. Hes keeping alive something people feel like theyre losing and throughout his life, later later become something that theyre worried that hes standing in the way of which america should be changing, but he always him bodied something thats going on in the country and the way people feel about themselves. Those soldiers who followed him only saw him from behind with the red scarf because he was always right in front. Rate they did not see him leading the retreat. He did not retreat, theres no question about that. Its interesting how we focus so much as a people on the last stand and how custer died. People forget that this young soldier was so instrumental in freeing millions of slaves and their children and their grandchildren forever. It really was and important soldier in the war. That shows both sides of him. I present a very complex picture that theyre definitely not the monochromatic picture that you get for those who want to depict him as an arrogant genocidal maniac. He had real strengths and he had real flaws. Both are why he was famous and notorious. So in the battle, the big surprise for me was a newly he was brave and lucky as he himself knew. I knew he was courageous. Surprisingly, he was a real professional when it came to combat. He was this individualistic guy who was always expecting the rules to be better and i did things like look at his personnel records and see how hes being reprimanded because he would call truces and go hang out with his pals in the confederate army. How later on april were writing about him how hes living up to his reputation. That the army and the rumors would gossip about him passing through the army. You can see it in the official writings about him where hes living up to his reputation of a problem officer. But in combat was the one area where he was a professional. He wrote about how this revolutionary, technological invention that is actually putting an end to the kind of warfare hes grayed out which are the cavalry charges. He wrote this is the most Important Development of the war in terms of arms. He has rifled artillery and he leads charges at moments when they are able to break the enemy line. So the real surprise was that thats the one area where this volatile selfdestructive guy was always professional and in command of himself. He was always confident and he wasnt impulsive. Ironically, because because he died in such a disastrous fashion everybody thinks hes a fool and arrogant in warfare and what not, but thats exactly why he was so, one of the many reasons why he was so good at fighting. People hated him in the army but usually acknowledged he was good at fighting. And of course, your book isnt really focused on the battle, but in your epilogue i think you make it pretty clear that you believe his subordinates let him down at little big horn and the plan mightve worked but of course i wouldnt of had a career. Nevertheless, he really was almost betrayed. Up same time, they were problematic officers. There no question about it. Also, i have to say, we were chatting last night and i mentioned, i really, i really shouldve emphasize this more in terms of that, but i didnt want to get too deep in little big horn. He was the effective field commander. It was his job to maintain those relationships. Thats what he was bad at was managing that. The kind of Institutional Culture of an l realization of society out of the civil war. It was not a cog in the machine. He was never good at being a manager. So if you see that transition, but the engine difficulty starts quickly after the civil war leads up to his death. He did not maintain good relationships. They had a problematic relationship as part of that has got to be the commanders fault. They were problem officers and the testimony is quite remarkable. They came up with four contradictory excuses for why he did not follow orders. He hired as his cook, the escaped slave name eliza brown who was a teenager and she not only became his cook but she took on that role with some Real Authority caret she distributed food to other contraband. She lobbied custer and his wife to teach them about the horrors of slavery. She traded information with officers from other commands. She herself was incredibly formidable formidable figure. Just like his role in management shows custer immersed in the rise of the society and so his personal household reflects the way in which the world is changing as a result of the civil war. Not only have they been freed but africanamericans are asserting themselves. Theyre saying we deserve a place in society, Pay Attention to what we been through. Custer has respect and affection for her and she has a real effect on his views on race and yet he also is an ideological conservative democrat in that struggle, both personal and on the public stage with the way the war has shaped america and the way he, like Many Americans are very hesitant about these changes an